3Delight Outline rendering PLEASE HELP

noahimself

So I was exporting a house I made in Chief Architecture and wanted to achieve this kind of render which is available as a preset in Chief Architecture

But the closest I can get in Daz Studio is this:

So can anyone here help me on how to achieve a "line drawing" draw style?

Tobor

Neither of your D|S examples look like finished renders. They're the realtime viewport images, which lacks a lot of detail of an actual render.

There are some canned solutions for line rendering options for the 3Delight renderer in D|S. I'd concentrate on those first. 

noahimself

Yeah I'm planning to use it only for art references, so I don't really need finished renders. Can you help me how to do it with 3Delight? I'm fine with a viewport renderer too, though

EDIT: I tried to use the Scripted 3Delight and choosing "Outline" as the Render Script and checked my "Outline Directory" and got three files: Outline_Frm0_Normal, Outline_Frm0_Depth, and Outline_Frm0_ColorID

This is the Normal one:

What should I do with them?

Mythmaker

I haven't played much with the pwToon shader since I got it a week ago, but here's a 20 second IPR render

"Technical Drawing" preset and default setting, only darken the grey blue shading for this. 

Only use a distant light and an uberenviroment. Not bad for a preview quality at 300x300 I think.

noahimself

I wanted to achieve something like in Figure 1 of this 3Delight article but I have no idea how to do it

https://3delight.atlassian.net/wiki/display/3DFM/Layers+Outlining

EDIT: I tried inverting the Normal file, and I got this:

It's nowhere near the outline quality in Chief Architect or the example in the 3Delight documentation. What am I doing wrong? Please help

Eustace Scrubb

What does the "Depth" image look like?

noahimself

Eustace Scrubb said:

What does the "Depth" image look like?

This is the depth image, I inverted it because otherwise it's invisible when I posted it here

cm152335

i see shadow on render,, try with no lights 

noahimself

The "Delete All Lights" is grayed off so I assume there is no light in my scene. And there is no lights on my Scene tab either. I tried turning off the Headlamp option in the Render settings too. But the depth image remains the same

I don't understand :( :( :( :(

djigneo

I'm confident the Depth output you're getting has nothing to do with your lighting setup.

There are some issues* with the Outline example render script, but perhaps there are a few things we could do to coax better lines (although in my opinion the normal and depth lines aren't that useful, generally).

The way the script works is by using the 3Delight render engine's feature that will draw lines based on differences on render-time scene variables. In the case of normals,  lines are drawn based on how drastic the difference is between the direction two adjacent surfaces are facing, which is why you're getting somewhat reasonable output from that variable (since the building being rendered is largely right angles). In the case of Depth, my guess is that the 'Depth Edge Threshold' render property is too small and/or the 'Depth Line Width' is too large. Try fiddling with those settings in Render settings > Editor > Renderer options > Outlines > Depth.

Depth Edge Threshold decides how drastic the difference in depth must be in order to draw a line. Since you're getting a lot of thick lines, I suggest trying larger values.

Depth Line Width decides how the thick the line will be when it decides to draw one. I suggest trying smaller values.

There are similar properties for the Normal variable as well, so experimenting there could coax out some better-looking normal lines.

* Particularly, the script does not currently support line color properties (which is why they're always the default color of white), and ColorId lines do not work for "color" ColorId values (though textures in the ColorId properties do indeed work so the issue can be worked around by creating solid texture files).